Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

Let’s speak today about the drought. We all know, living here in Los Angeles, what it’s like to live with drought. “Brown is the new green,” they tell us. “Save your water because it’s all gone,” they tell us. Scientists are telling us that this is probably the new normal.  The other day, I was in my garden when the sprinklers had stopped working. I looked down at the earth and it had shrunk back from the hedgeline.  Without water, the ground just dried up and pulled back from itself. Cracking open, into great fissures that ran deep into the earth. When there’s no water, teaches the tradition, there’s no life. The soil becomes hard and unforgiving.

Like the land, once you become thirsty, there’s not much else you can think about.  From the sacred readings of this holiday we know that Hagar, at the moment when she was cast out from the camp, Abraham gave her two skins of water, enough for a couple days.  But after walking into exile into the desert, her tongue dried up.  There was no place for her to turn, and she took her lad Ishmael and placed him in the shade of a small bush. She started to cry as  she couldn't bear to see this young boy die a refugee in exile from his home, with no future, parched from the lack of water.  

We know from the text that in a great act of mercy, in a great act of compassion, the angel came out of heaven and got close to them, the angel got proximal to them, and asked after their troubles and gave this suffering mother and son the luscious flowing drink.

The angel helped them find a well, and they named it “Be’er Lchai Roi’i”  “the well that let me see my life,”  flowing with sweet unending water.  The angel said to the mother and the son who felt dejected, disfavored, kicked out, lost “You too are my people.” “You too shall be loved. You too shall have a part in prosperity.”

It’s right here on Rosh Hashanah, it’s in the Torah.

Think about that.

In the Talmud, when droughts came, the community would gather together they would pray and they would declare a public fast. There’s a whole book in the Talmud called Ta’anit, dedicated to the very proposition that droughts are a communal concern that required both human and divine intervention.  The crops failed and the ground got hard and it cracked open, the cisterns empty, the folk gathered together in places of study and worship, and they would take out the mighty shofar and sound the blasts hundreds of times, filling the whole community with a sense of urgency. The blast called Terua’h which you’ve heard here many times today, comes from this part of the Talmud. They would go to rooftops and sound the haunting shocking blasts of the mighty horn calling out, “this is an emergency!”  “We must do something to save ourselves!”  Such is the great calamity of the drought.  When there is no water to slake our thirst, when there is no angel overhead to give us drink, when water ceases to flow over the land, when there is no water to bring life back to the dead.  They blew that shofar and cried out to the world:

This is truly an emergency!

Now lest you think this sermon this morning is only about water, you don’t know me very well. There’s a greater drought that I feel compelled to address. It’s not the lack of rain, nor the wellsprings of water that seem to have given up their gifts to us that drew my attention to this topic today. We have the Department of Water and Power to help us through the drought of water. Although if you looked at my water bill, I’m sure you’d know how well (or not) that situation is being handled. No, what I am talking about cannot be handled by any governmental department. There are no bureaucrats, even the the most conscientious, efficient and most well meaning of ones can do a thing to quench the drought I speak of today. It is a drought of a different kind.

It’s the kind of drought that this day was built for.  

A drought that brings us together in this house of study and worship.  

A drought that compels us to pull out the shofar and sound the Terua’h.

A drought that makes us want to shout from the rooftops and say, this is an emergency!  

Friends, when I look at the year that was, and the world I see today, there is a strange drought, not of water, but a drought of mercy a drought of compassion in our world.  

Just like that soil beneath our feet, compassion, mercy, love - when it’s missing we become hard and we shrink back from each other.  We allow the fissures of our own bigotry, bias, sexism, hatred, racism, classism, xenophobia, open a yawning chasm between us. We shrink away from one another, looking to protect our own interests to the exclusion of others. We let the fissures between us grow. And just like the soil, our souls when not watered with compassion, die a little every day.   

When we stop drinking from the flowing waters of love that moisten our tear ducts at the plight of the despondent, or moisten our backs with the sweat of the hard work to pull those who have not yet found prosperity out of poverty.

Without that living water of compassion our hearts become hard like the soil, and we die a little.  

One only need to look back at the past couple of years to see with me just how arid the world’s ethics has become. How dry and brittle our sense of togetherness is.  How our own personal wellsprings of morality have stopped flowing.  

In Syria, half a million are dead. 60 million are homeless. More than anytime in the history of the world.  Since last week, at least 96 children have been killed and 223 have been injured in eastern Aleppo, I first drafted this sermon.

What choices to do they have? If they stay, they end up like little Omar Daqneesh, a small boy, five-years-old, not much younger than my own child. Where my son wakes at 3:00 a.m. thirsty for water, Omar woke on a Wednesday this summer at 3:00 a.m.  to his whole world collapsing around  him. As the screaming of a jet is heard overhead and the bomb piercing the roof of his apartment, floors crushing together under the explosion like a paper cup. His brother Ali mortally injured. His parent’s lying in the ruins. I watched along with the world with the sheer intensity as he stared silently sitting in that orange chair barefoot, wiping dried blood and thick soot from his face.

What choice do they have? If they choose to leave, there’s a good chance they will die on the journey to safety, by violence, starvation, or as the world knows the fate of little Alan Kurdi, whose body was found laying next to the sea that took his life.

Oh how hard, how dried up our compassion has become, Oh how parched our world is for love.

But let us not pretend that this drought has dried out our cisterns of compassion only in the Middle East. Let us dodge no issues, let us make no compromise with callousness. In this drought, racism, sexism, bigotry, violence, xenophobia, here in America are all consequences of the moral desiccation of our age.

If you look at the California Endowment’s website, you can type in your ZIP code in today and it will tell you what your life expectancy is. They’ve taken hundreds of studies and statistics and aggregated them together into a little app on their website. If you type 91436, our ZIP code at VBS, your average expectancy for life is about 83 years. If you live in South LA, your life expectancy is less than 75 years. That’s an eight year difference. It’s not a matter of luck.  

It’s a matter of racial and economic discrimination. Poor white people and people of color were pushed into the least desirable parts of town. Where there’s too much traffic, not enough medical services, no access to capital, overcrowded under-resourced schools.  

Before you close up your ears and say that there’s no such thing as systemic racism, you must know that you don’t have to be racist to be part of system that has racialized outcomes.  

What do you call a system that disadvantages some and advantages others, and those who are left in the dust or overwhelmingly people of color?  

What do you call an educational system that places the best teachers and the most resources in schools that leave the overwhelming number of kids of color behind?

What do you call an economic system where the rules leave a disproportionate number of people of color without access to good capital investment, where businesses can’t grow, homes can’t be bought, good, upwardly mobile jobs can’t be found?  

It’s not the people who are racist, per se, but the outcomes of our political, education, social system have racial outcomes. What do you call systems like that?  

Racist.

That’s systemic racism.  

And then there is the harder edge, the more violent edge. We must say their names. Terence Crutcher, or Eric Garner, or Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, or, the numbers of other men and women of color who met the end of their lives unnecessarily at the hands of the police.

Or if it’s Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, Officer Michael Krol, Sgt. Michael Smith, Officer Brent Thompson, Officer "Patrick" Zamarripa, all peace officers that were murdered in the streets that they were trying to protect this last summer in my hometown, Dallas.

Racism and it’s backlashes of violence, these deaths are because of our lack of compassion.

Oh how hard, how dried up our compassion has become, Oh how parched our world is for love.

We know that religion can be as much as a culprit against compassion as anything else. When in San Bernardino, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, murdered those innocents at the Inland Regional Center.

Or in Orlando, when Omar Marteen went to the Pulse Nightclub where he  killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in the largest hate crime terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.   

Oh how hard, how dried up our compassion has become, Oh how parched our world is for love.

I feel moved by Rabbi Heschel’s words, who when asked to speak on the first and only conference on Religion and Race in 1965 said, “How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality of some inevitably ends as inequality of all.”  

Oh how we have forgotten this wisdom.

Oh how hard, how dried up our compassion has become, Oh how parched our world is for love.

Now I know that many in this room can be uncomfortable if we bring upon racial tensions. It’s easier for us to decry the hate from the jihadists or bigotry against our own people or against the State of Israel than it is look here at home.

I know that the dizzying nature of the violence and injustice we see everyday can give us moral laryngitis. It can exhaust our ability to act because we simply don’t know where to begin. As Martin Luther King once said, “ when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do...we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty.”

I know that all of our own lives are already busy. With business and travel. With taking care of our families and our social commitments.  

I know that many come here today on this holy day of the New Year, to find sanctuary, from the tumult of the world. That a synagogue should be a respite from the outside world. And there are those who say the faithful should have no voice in the social political world. My life inside this building has nothing to do with what happens outside this building, it is my sanctuary.   

But there’s no word in Hebrew for sanctuary. Sanctuary is a word derived from the Latin sanctuarium, meaning a container for keeping something in. We have no word in Hebrew for that kind of spirituality. We have no notion of Sanctuary.  

When God created the world, according the kabbalists, the world couldn't contain God’s essence. When Solomon dedicated his grand Temple, he said, "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain You. How much less this temple I have built!”  There’s no containing God’s Presence in the prophetic mind.

In fact our first sanctuary, wasn’t the marble and limestone in Jerusalem. Our holiest shrine for two thousand years was a tent in the desert, open to the currents and heat of the world. Our meeting places of worship are Batei Knesset, Houses of Meeting.  The first home a wedding couple builds is their chuppah, open on all sides. Our sukkah, a place that, according to the Talmud, represents God’s protective glory is nothing more than a fragile shack that blows down in the wind.  

We know nothing of Sanctuary. We know only of holiness between people. We call it brit, or covenant about the promises we make to each other and to God. We know nothing of sanctuary. We only know brit, holiness through relationship despite the fragility of the walls of our tents and temples. A temple is a place of prophecy, of meeting place of poetry, or as the Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins says, a place where truth marries beauty.

Our understanding of holiness is not to hide away from the world but to go into the world. Our holy places must have windows, say the rabbis and not mirrors because we want to live in a world of windows and not of mirrors.

And as we look out of those windows on this world, it is parched. The poor cry out thirsty for our love. Those that feel disadvantaged because of they are black, or Latino, or gay, or are women, or they’re immigrants or refugees, they are crying out like Hagar and Ishmael!  

This world is dry dry dry. Shall we not look upon this spiritual drought with the same intensity as our ancestors did?

Shall we not gather together in our places of study in our places of worship and blow the shofar and say, “This is an emergency?!”  

This is an emergency?

Oh how hard, how dried up our compassion has become, Oh how parched our world is for love.

The word compassion in Hebrew is Merachem. It comes from the word rechem meaning womb, a source of life and love for every person that lives. We attach this name to God when we seek God’s compassion.  

We call upon God HaRachaman, when we have eaten our fill and are satisfied. Ask God to share the love we feel at that moment with others.

We call on God today over and over again El Rachun v’Chanun, Oh God of compassion and Grace. We ask for God to move from a sense of sterile judgement, of din, to that of compassion, rachamim. The Book of Life is open. We ask God to sign names in love and compassion into its ledger. But not for us alone, but for our family and community, for those we know and those we don’t know. The Book of Life is open today.   

And when we stand over the graves of our beloved fathers and mothers of our brothers and sisters, and even our own children God forbid, we call upon God, El Maleh Rachamim shochein bamromim, a God full of compassion who dwells on high, to give compassion to the dead and for the living.  

The word merachem is a transitive, active verb.  You can’t just sit there and have compassion in Hebrew, you must do compassion.  

You don’t have compassion for the mourner, you go to their home and help them put things in order.  

You don’t have compassion for the poor, you give charity, or help them find a job.  

You don’t have compassion for those who live at the margins of society, you go there, you become proximal, you live with them.  

In Hebrew, compassion is lived behavior, not simply a feeling.  It’s what waters our souls and softens our hearts. The idea of active compassion teaches us that each of us, as the lawyer, writer, and advocate, Bryan Stevenson said,  “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Compassion, rachamim teaches that we are not our mistakes. We are so much more than our worst selves. And if that’s true for us, then it’s  true for everyone, the refugee, the poor, the dejected, the ex-con, anyone who's ever made a mistake, anyone who doesn't look like us, think like us, lives like us, deserves as much compassion, actively, as we ask for ourselves from God today.

The Book of Life is open today.

Rabbi Schulweis once taught that God did not create religion. God created the universe and we men and women, created religion. He said on Rosh Hashanah, while other religions count their years by acts of religious advent and cataclysms that shaped their culture we Jews chose for ourselves a more universal stance. If you are Christian you call this year 2017 Anno Domini, in the year of our LORD, Jesus. If you are Muslim, today begins the new year of 1438 AH or al Hijira. Or in the advent of Muhammad. For us, this Rosh Hashanah is called 5777, not since Sinai or the Exodus, not since birth of Moses, or Abraham, but since the creation of the very world.  

That’s because Judaism is an outward facing religion. One that it never solely for it’s own sake, but for the sake of the world. God’s outstretched arms, inspire our outstretch our arms. God’s mighty hands inspire our mighty hands. Just as God reached into the world, so must we reach into the world.

As Stevenson writes again, “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. … I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

This is the drought I’m speaking of, this dryness that pulls us away from each other. That hardens our hearts against each other.  It’s only through compassion, our active compassion that we can water our souls, and slake the thirst that is crying to us from the land.   

Back in the Talmud the leaders convened the community, it had not rained for many days. They had no idea what to do. The community was on the verge of collapse. Then one rabbi noticed that a divorced husband was not paying the proper alimony to his former wife and children. This rabbi ensured that the payments were being made so the woman and children could eat. Another found out that the orphans were not being cared for. He volunteered time to meet them and teach them. Only then, when one person acted compassionately to another did the sky begin to fill with clouds, and the rains came. For they finally leaned into their feeling of being uncomfortable in the world they lived. They heard the cry of the shofar, and they listened, to the words of the prophet Amos who said,

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  

In the coming weeks I seek to convene conversations about our relationship as Jews to people of color. I invite you to join me. I do not know what shape it will take but I know it must happen. We need to be proximal, like God, and choose to become close to that which we do not know.  I’ve already reached out to many pastors and community organizations to learn from them. I’m also looking into the refugee crisis.

If you are interested, please join me in these very important conversations where we can get to know our neighbors be they, next door, or across the globe. It is our proximity that will create our compassion. It is our acts of compassion that will build this world with love.

As Martin Buber says, “All life is meeting.” It begins with proximity, with story, with relationship. Join me in this conversation. See me after, write me an email.    

I end by paraphrasing Heschel, “There is no rock so hard that these mighty waters cannot pierce it,” he writes. I would say there is no heart so hard that the waters of compassion cannot soften. Justice is not only a value, but a challenge, as Heschel says, “a restless drive..”. While now the ground is hard, the surge is choked, the and sweep is blocked. This mighty stream will break all dikes. It will flow sweetly, and the world will again be reborn in compassion and love.  

A sweet healthy New Year to you and your families. May this year be a year of compassion, conscience, justice, and love.

Shanah Tovah.